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Sauce

Panade or Panada

A simple sauce thickened with flour, butter, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Panade or Panada

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a small saucepan, combine the water, butter, and salt.

  2. Bring to a boil over medium heat.

  3. Gradually stir in the sifted flour, mixing vigorously with a wooden spoon.

  4. Continue stirring until the mixture pulls away from the sides of the pan.

  5. Spread the panada on a plate and let it cool before using.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Starch that gelatinizes with the hot water and butter to thicken the sauce into a paste.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, more tender texture in the finished panada.
Water
Liquid that the flour starch absorbs and swells in as the mixture heats.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the boiling liquid. Adding flour gradually and stirring vigorously prevents lumps. Cooking until the mixture pulls away from the pan drives off excess moisture and fully gelatinizes the starch, so the panada sets to the right thickness.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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